


there's no place like home

by CoaxionUnlimited



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Deep Roads (Dragon Age), F/F, Rated T for Extremely Tame (and also language), Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:34:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26229502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CoaxionUnlimited/pseuds/CoaxionUnlimited
Summary: In a universe where Duncan didn't make it to Orzammar, a disgraced princess and a casteless fugitive run into each other while escaping their respective executions.Surprisingly, they hit it off.
Relationships: Female Aeducan/Female Brosca (Dragon Age)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 24
Collections: Black Emporium 2020





	there's no place like home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jarakrisafis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jarakrisafis/gifts).



The funeral had been the last straw.

In retrospect, Brosca thought sourly, turning tail and running directly into the deep roads had not been the smart choice. At the time, drowned in the suffocating fumes of ritewine and the macabre cheers of the mourners, it had been the only choice. 

The same stubborn attachment to her own neck that had driven her for her entire life - from her difficult birth, to her recruitment to the Carta, to the desperate enlistment in the Legion of the Dead that had stayed her execution - had refused to let her accept even the symbolic death demanded by the Legion.

And so, here she was. The half-finished legion tattoo raw and weeping on her face, the bloodstains drying on the armor she’d killed Beraht in, the grim, chipped edges of the twin axes she’d looted from an unfortunate pile of bones in the first frantic minutes of her escape - she must, she thought to herself, look like a monster.

Not that there’d be anyone down here to see it. She still looked a sight better than the darkspawn from the stories Rica used to tell her, to keep her from playing in the tunnels. She shouldn’t have thought of them. Brosca had never run into a darkspawn, even on the rare occasions she’d been outside of Orzammar. She’d had no interest in the ancestral war to drive the darkspawn back and reclaim the glories of the ancients. 

Now, with the pounding of her feet on old stone loud in her ears, she couldn’t shake the habitual fear of the things that had almost destroyed her entire species. It was stupid, she knew it was stupid, it wasn’t like she cared about the fate of the dwarven people, they certainly didn’t care about her-

In the tunnel ahead, there was a rustling noise. 

Brosca froze, like a startled nug. The noise didn’t stop, didn’t get closer or further away. The sensible thing to do, the safe thing to do, would be to turn and run. Get away from it and never look back.

Unfortunately, as Rica, Leske, and the half dozen scars she’d got off defying Behrat would all tell you, Brosca had never been good at doing the sensible thing. Brosca slowed, letting her steps go soft and silent against the stone floor, and padded down the tunnel towards the noise.

She ignored one branch, then two, to finally poke her head around a corner and see-

No. Shit, that couldn’t be right. 

Brosca must have made some small noise of shock, because the dwarf that had been making enough noise to draw her down the hall stopped poking at the massive stone coffin and turned to face her.

“Hello,” said the princess of Orzammar, quite calmly.

“What the fuck,” replied Brosca.

The esteemed lady Aeducan wrinkled her nose. “Is that how one greets people in Dust town?”

The honest curiosity in her voice startled a laugh out of Brosca. From any other person, she’d have suspected those words were a condescending reprimand. The lady Aeducan, however, managed an air of perfect sincerity. Anyways, it wasn’t as though she was completely wrong...

“No,” Brosca said, forcing herself under control. “We say hello just like you, princess.”

“I’m not a princess any longer,” Aeducan said, the words almost mechanical in the utter lack of emotion with which she delivered them. “What are you doing here?”

“Here? In the Deep Roads?” Brosca snorted. “I’m having a nice fucking picnic with the darkspawn, that’s what I’m doing.”

“I don’t think that would be wise,” Aeducan said.

“I was being sarcastic.”

“Oh.” Aeducan frowned, the first expression Brosca had seen on her soft face.

“I’m running away from my execution,” Brosca said, when it seemed Aeducan would wait for an explanation. 

“You didn’t pick a good place to run to,” Aeducan said, as though Brosca didn’t know it. She didn’t give her time to make a snarky comment, instead continuing her sentence. “This,” she gestured to the stone around them, “is my execution.”

“What did you do?” Brosca asked. She’d thought the noble families could buy themselves out of any justice.

“I killed my brother,” Aeducan replied, the words as flat and unemotional as every other thing she’d said.

Brosca paused for a second, waiting for the laughter. The admission that it was a joke, that she hadn’t really-

“Why?” she demanded.

Aeducan blinked at her. “Does it matter?”

“You killed your fucking brother. You’d need a damn good reason.”

“I didn’t,” said Aeducan. 

“You didn’t have a reason?” Brosca parroted.

Aeducan just stood there. Looking at her. Brosca would have called the expression empty, but she’d seen empty in Dust town. There were a few fuckers in every gang that got off on killing - she’d never found them good company, but they’d never scared her. Down in Dust town, it was natural. No, the ones to watch for were the ones that didn’t care about the killing at all, because if you couldn’t give a shit about the murder, you didn’t have enough feeling left to keep you from sticking a knife in your partner’s back.

That wasn’t Aeducan. Brosca’s instincts had kept her alive through the worst Beraht had to throw at her, through all the shit in Dust town, and they were telling her Aeducan could be trusted. That, and something else.

“Oh shit,” Brosca said, “you didn’t kill him.”

Aeducan closed her eyes and dipped her chin, once. 

“Then why the fuck are you down here?”

“An inquiry would have damaged the reputation of House Aeducan,” Aeducan said, like that meant anything. “Besides which, Bhelan had arranged things so that I would get no trial.”

“Bhelan?” The name sounded familiar.

“My younger brother,” Aeducan said. “The one that isn’t dead.”

“He killed your older brother?” Brosca demanded.

“He sent mercenaries.” Aeducan said, like that made it any better.

“And you’re not going to do anything about it? You’ll just leave your older brother to go to the stone unavenged?”

Aeducan blinked, slowly. “He won. Making a fuss about it would be unseemly.”

“So, what, you’re just going to leave it there? Let me guess, trying to survive in the Deep Roads would also be unseemly.” The last word came out a sneer. Something about that calm resignation pissed her off. It was unnatural, to just let yourself die to cover for the fucker that’d tried to kill you. No decent duster would do something that stupid.

“I was going to try to make it to the surface.” Aeducan’s tone was faintly offended. “I imagine you were going to do the same.”

“No shit,” Brosca hissed. “Unlike you, I don’t want to die.”

“Would you like to travel together?” Aeducan asked, as abruptly and casually as if she were talking about sharing a beer. “If you would accept my company, that is. I’ve fought the darkspawn before, I’m sure I would be an asset to-”

“Are you seriously asking me that?” Brosca didn’t bother to wait for Aeducan to reply, the answer was obvious. “Yes, I’ll fight with you. Watch my back, and I’ll watch yours.”

Brosca didn’t mention that she’d never so much as seen a darkspawn. She’d never been a liability in a fight before, she wouldn’t be one now. They couldn’t be that much harder to kill than Beraht had been.

That cheered Aeducan up, for some reason. “We’ll need to get you some armor, then,” she said, the frown disappearing.

“What?” Brosca blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “I have armor.”

“Plate armor,” Aeducan corrected, “and a helmet. The darkspawn spread the taint through their blood. Your armor isn’t enough to keep it out.”

“You’ve got an armorer down here?” Brosca frowned at her to cover the flipping of her stomach. She didn’t want to think about the taint.

“No,” Aeducan said, “I found armor on my own. Come on, we might find more.”

-

By found, Aeducan meant looted off a corpse. 

Brosca hadn’t paid much attention to the bodies in her flight from the Legion’s barracks, except to avoid tripping on them. She’d been too busy listening for pursuers and darkspawn to think much of anything that wasn’t moving. Now, with Aeducan rifling through every one they passed in search of usable equipment, the sheer number of them began to make an impression on her. 

Brosca had known - if only because everyone knew - that the dwarves had been fighting the darkspawn for generations. That the Legion of the Dead had been fighting in the tunnels for just as long as the Warrior caste had been throwing itself at them. 

She hadn’t bothered to consider how many of them died doing it. It hadn’t seemed truly real until she found herself stopped at the mouth of a tunnel, unable to take a step forward without setting her foot in dwarven bones. 

Aeducan apparently had no such qualms, ducking into a fancy alcove off a well carved hallway to ease a gauntlet off a body that had long since rotted to dust and bone.

“You know,” Brosca said, into the hollow, oppressive silence of the Stone, “I’ve spent most of my life working for the Carta. Murderers and thieves to a one. The worst scum Orzammar has to offer. And I have never met a motherfucker as happy to rob the dead as you.”

Aeducan tossed the gauntlet over her shoulder. Brosca caught it by reflex, and made a face. “Are you trying to insult me?” she asked, with a hint of genuine curiosity. 

“Yes,” Brosca snapped, then made a face. “No. Mostly I’d just like to get away from the creepy-ass bone piles before the darkspawn come for us.”

“We’d hear them coming,” Aeducan said.

“Not the point,” Brosca replied. “Now come on, get away from the bones before they decide to get up and haunt us.”

“They’re dead,” Aeducan said, “they don’t care.”

“Yes,” Brosca said, “they fucking do. Get out of the bone pile, princess, before the ghosts take offense.”

“Ghosts aren’t real,” said Aeducan, with the confidence of a woman that had never been dragged on a tomb raid.

And of course, because the spirits of the dead had a nasty sense of humor, it was then that one of them decided to manifest. Before Brosca could so much as shout a warning, it had buried its blade almost hilt-deep in Aeducan’s armored chest.

The former princess of Orzammar cried out, and wrenched away from the blade. Luckily for her, ghost weapons weren’t as good as the real thing. They hurt like fuck if you got hit and they could certainly kill you, but they weren’t solid enough to leave wounds behind. Aeducan threw herself to the side and the ghostly sword tore reluctantly free of her body.

This was where a sensible person would run. Or at least start screaming. Leske had just about shit himself the first time they’d run into a ghost. 

Brosca hadn’t known Aeducan very long, but she knew full well that sensible wasn’t in the princess of Orzammar’s playbook. With a curse, she ripped her knives free of their sheathes and charged forward to bury the both of them in the ghost’s almost-solid back. 

This was the worst part of fighting ghosts. There was resistance when Brosca dragged her knives down through spectral flesh and bone, but not enough that you could mistake it for stabbing a person. It was like stabbing your knife through a body unburied long enough to go soft with rot. More than that mental image, which she’d never been able to shake, the fact was that you could never do very much damage to a ghost. Just as their weapons were too spectral to draw blood, your weapons were too real to hurt them in turn.

Brosca had never seen a ghost killed before. She’d never met anyone stupid enough to try and do it.

But Aeducan, despite the dubiously-real gut wound that had to be hurting like a bitch, looked all too ready to try. Brosca’s knives tore imaginary rents in the ghost’s back, and Aeducan waited, perfectly still, for Brosca’s momentum to carry her away from the ghost. Almost before Brosca was clear, she struck. 

Brosca’d never spent much time thinking about the skill of people she fought with. Either they were good enough to keep themselves alive, or they weren’t. All the fluffy diamond quarter poetry about the beauty and holiness of the Provings was nothing more than noble frivolity. But watching Aeducan move-

The princess of Orzammar was fast, tearing into the ghost like fire through oil. Not a movement was wasted, not a moment lost to calculating what she’d do next. For the first time in her life, Brosca had to struggle to keep pace. But the pace was worth the struggle. Aeducan was as good a partner as she was a swordswoman, taking ruthless advantage of the openings Brosca created and forcing the ghost’s attention away from her so she could create more. It felt like a dance - Brosca made a move and Aeducan followed seamlessly, Aeducan struck and Brosca jammed her knives into the its wide open back. 

Brosca found herself almost sad when the ghost fell, finally dissolving into dust motes and light, an emotion so unfamiliar she wanted to stand still and gape at it for a bit. Instead, she gave Aeducan a look out of the corner of her eys and commented, 

“You’re good at this.”

“So are you,” Aeducan replied, her face splitting briefly into a sunny smile that did distressing things to Brosca’s heartrate. “Who trained you? I’ve never seen anyone fight like that before.”

“I-” It must have been a natural question for a noble to ask. “No one. I trained myself.”

Aeducan blinked at her, nonplussed. Before she could ask the questions Brosca knew were coming, Brosca turned down the hallway. 

“We should get moving,” she said, somewhat lamely. 

Aeducan didn’t seem to realize this was supposed to be a change of subject. “That’s a pity,” she said, and though her face had fallen back into its native lack of expression, Brosca could feel the cheer radiating off her. “No one has ever been able to keep up with me like that.”

On anyone else, it would have come off as bragging. From Aeducan it seemed like a simple statement of fact. Brosca had never spent much time thinking about people keeping up or not when she was in a fight, but she had to admit…

“Me either.” 

“I fight in the way of my ancestors, the way Aeducans have for a hundred generations and more,” Aeducan said, matter-of-factly. “So, I suppose it’s not a question of style.”

“Maybe not, princess,” Brosca said. “How are we getting out of here, anyways? I’m guessing you had a plan.” 

“The plan was not to die,” Aeducan said, simply. “I had no idea where they would drop me, nothing I could bring with. And I certainly don’t know where the darkspawn are.”

“So we’re fucked.” Brosca said, feeling ice creep through her veins. Stone sense gave her some idea of where they were in relation to where they started, but she had no idea how to get to the surface.

Aeducan shot her a disapproving look. “Not exactly,” she said. “I spent enough time studying them to know the Deep Roads. If I can figure out where we are, I can get us to the surface.”

“How would you do that?” Brosca wasn’t quite ready to hope. It made the words come out sharper than she’d meant them. Aeducan didn’t seem to notice.

“We would need to get to the Deep Roads first,” Aeducan said, “that shouldn’t be hard, usually the thaigs link to them somehow. Then we would need to find a marker or a landmark. If we can find out what family this thaig belonged to and that family was well known, I would be able to tell from that.” 

“So,” Brosca said, dryly, “we need to wander around the haunted thaig until we happen to run into an entrance to the Deep Roads. Presumably while praying to the ancestors that the ghosts don’t kill us and that it’s not infested with darkspawn.”

“Yes, exactly,” Aeducan said, with much more optimism than this warranted. The princess of Orzammar had never been on a tomb raid before, and Brosca was not looking forward to seeing her disillusioned. “We ought to look for armor and better weapons as well.”

“You do remember what happened five minutes ago? When the ghost attacked us for disturbing its precious plate armor?”

Aeducan shot her a look. “Trust me,” she said, and the cheer was gone from her voice, “you would rather a ghost killed you than the taint.”

Brosca couldn’t argue with that.

-

Exploring the thaig was just as miserable as Brosca had expected it to be.

Time, without the omnipresent mechanical clocks of Orzammar, blurred into an indistinguishable mess. Sometimes it ran slow and sticky, sometimes Brosca would look up from a task and feel like it had run away from her. Brosca hadn’t brought anything with her to measure it, and though Aeducan had been rich enough to own an actual pocket watch, it had been taken from her at the trial with everything else. 

There was no way to know how long they had spent in the thaig. It felt like days, maybe a week. Maybe more. Aeducan didn’t seem disturbed by it, and Brosca refused to ask her. 

Staying alive in the thaig was, strangely, less difficult than Brosca had imagined it. Aeducan’s tutors hadn’t just taught her of the glory of the ancients, they’d taught her about infrastructure and the layout of their buildings. Which Brosca would have dismissed as supremely useless knowledge, had Aeducan not used it to operate their fountains and guarantee a basically infinite supply of fresh water. For her part, Brosca had been foraging outside of Orzammar before. Roasted nug and wild lichen was no one’s idea of a good meal, but they were easy to get and all but immune to the taint.

The thaig itself wasn’t infested with darkspawn, at least, as far as either of them had seen. Aeducan thought that had something to do with the silverite inlay that festooned everything in it. Brosca didn’t care about the reason. She kept focused on the other things that infested it. 

There were giant cave spiders everywhere, first off. Not just one or two, by Brosca’s count they had killed more than forty. She was willing to indulge Aeducan’s pontificating about why there were so many, because there certainly weren’t enough nugs to sustain them. And as if there weren’t enough spiders, they had to contend with the ghosts. 

Most of them were docile, though Brosca’d just about crawled out of her skin the first time she heard one of them talking. They followed set paths, repeated ancient conversations, and generally ignored anything that wasn’t centuries old. The living dwarves had little to do with the more violent kind, not since they’d finished raiding the catacombs, but Brosca never wanted to repeat the experience of taking on five of them at once.

Aeducan had figured out the name of the thaig a few hours after they’d entered the main cavern. Revann thaig, important enough to be the target of a few research expeditions, but not important enough that their results made it to the lady Aeducan. It had access to the deep roads, and Aeducan could navigate them to the surface once they got there, but she had no idea where in the thaig that access was.

That, already, was luckier than Brosca had expected. 

Even luckier, the thaig got emptier the deeper in they got. They’d been practically knee-deep in spiders on the outskirts, but in the center of the thaig, there were only a few of them - giant and decrepit, but not venomous. Even the ghosts thinned out as they got further in. Brosca suspected that even they were creeped out by the thick, muffling silence that hung over the empty city. 

In hindsight, it should have made her suspicious. 

If she’d learned nothing else growing up in Dust Town, it was that these things always balanced out. But, Brosca was far enough from Dust Town and sick enough of this dead thaig that, when they stumbled into a giant barricaded door at the end of a stupidly spacious and well decorated road, she thought nothing of going after the locks.

Every door in Revann thaig was locked. Sometimes they were barricaded as well, with rotten wood or stone carvings or metal kitchen implements. They hadn’t run across any bodies, though Brosca supposed it had been long enough for even bone to crumble to dust. Ostensibly, the locked doors were the reason that Aeducan and Brosca hadn’t split up to cover more ground. Whatever her talents with the sword, the princess of Orzammar had no idea how to pick a lock. And however big her biceps (Brosca had checked, the jury was still out on whether they were enormous or just huge) most of the doors were made of solid steel, impossible to bash down.

Realistically, Brosca thought, Aeducan could have still covered ground on her own. It wasn’t like the entrance to the deep roads would be inside one of the thousands of locked houses, and the streets at least were mostly clear. But walking alone in a dead city, enduring the muffling stillness of air that no one had breathed in a thousand years and without even a watch to keep time, quickly became unbearable. 

She would maintain, when they got to the surface, that she hadn’t chickened out barely half a mile away from Aeducan. She certainly wouldn’t say that she’d sprinted back to her side, convinced despite what her eyes and ears were telling her that something was chasing after, watching her. The empty houses, with their locked doors, wouldn’t tell anyone.

Anyways, Aeducan must have felt it too. She’d been the one to suggest, in her blunt way, that they should stay together. For the sake of opening locked doors, of course. Brosca had agreed, quickly enough that she’d have embarrassed herself if Aeducan hadn’t been just as eager. Anyways, even without the creepy dead city to keep them together, Aeducan was surprisingly decent company. 

Brosca had never met anyone of the noble class. Even Beraht wasn’t stupid enough to think that was a good idea. But she’d spent enough time listening to Rica (and reading between the lines of what her sister said) to figure that they were assholes, each and every one. Aeducan could be an asshole, but Brosca got the impression it was mostly on accident. When she was thinking about it, Aeducan was scrupulously polite. When she wasn’t, she could be thoughtless and arrogant, but for the most part, she was just obsessed with swords and rules and dusty history and cheerfully indifferent to Brosca’s own asshattery. Add to that that she was easy on the eyes, and she made a better traveling companion than even Leske.

But, Brosca being stupid and getting attached wasn’t important. The door was.

It took her what felt like hours to get it open. The ancient dwarf that had designed it had been a motherfucker about it. Every lock Brosca picked drew back a layer of silverite and steel, revealing another lock that needed picking. And if she fucked one up, every lock before it would slam back under its plate, meaning she’d have to head back to the middle to try them all again.

Aeducan had occupied herself at first with dragging the debris that made up the slipshod barricade away from the door, making sure there’d be nothing to stop it from getting open. She’d offered to help, once it became clear that it wouldn’t be a simple matter for Brosca to pick it. Brosca had waved her off with a grumble about how she’d just fuck it up (she would, Aeducan had never touched a pick before in her life and there was no time to teach her) and she’d been sitting against the door, sharpening her sword ever since.

She really was, Brosca thought, stupidly attached to it for something she’d grabbed out of a coffin a few days ago. Brosca refused to examine how she’d cycled from hating the sound of Aeducan’s whetstone scraping softly against the edge of her sword, to tuning it out by instinct, to being comforted by the reminder that she wasn’t alone. That, for whatever reason, Aeducan had her back.

It wouldn’t last, she thought, jabbing viciously at the lock with her picks. No sense in getting comfortable.

The lock clicked. Brosca froze, waiting for it to snap back shut. To have to make her way around the entire damn spiral one more time.

Nothing. She’d done it.

“Yes!” Brosca hissed, triumphant, her mouth curling without her permission into a grin. She looked over to see if Aeducan had noticed. 

The princess of Orzammar was still absorbed in her blade, but when Brosca stepped back from the door, she looked up. 

“Is it done?” she asked, politely.

“Yeah,” Brosca said, still grinning. “Hold your applause until we’ve got it open, I don’t trust this motherfucker not to have a catch inside it.”

“I wasn’t applauding,” said Aeducan, ever-literal.

“You could be,” Brosca said. “Come on, princess, one of these days I’ll manage to impress you.”

“I am impressed,” muttered Aeducan. “I just wasn’t applauding.”

Brosca ignored that, so that she could keep her poker face, and tugged on Aeducan’s arm to point her towards the door. Aeducan shrugged her off, as she always did, but went obediently to the other handle and helped Brosca pull it open. The handles were shaped oddly, two halves of a circle set close together in the exact center of the door. The door didn’t swing outward when they pulled on them. Instead it folded up, sections of the door swallowed up by the middle, until they clicked together into two rectangles at either end.

Behind it was lava, gold, and a pathway that even Brosca could recognize as made by the ancients.

Behind it also, were nearly a dozen darkspawn, looking just as surprised to see them as Brosca felt.

“Well,” Brosca drawled, her hands falling to her daggers. “This is awkward.”

-

Aeducan beat her to the first one, which was embarrassing. No one in full plate armor should be able to move that quickly, and she’d left the lighter stuff for Brosca. A sword stroke, smooth as quicksilver, and its head was gone, Aeducan turning towards the next one. 

Brosca stopped paying attention to what her sword was doing then, because, with a high pitched noise, sharp and grating like metal scraping against metal, something black and toothy materialized from thin air and lunged for Aeducan’s back. That, Brosca thought, darting towards it with her knives drawn, was not to be tolerated. 

Aeducan barely seemed to notice the scratch of its claws against her armor, occupied with fending off one of the burlier darkspawn. The shrieking thing, on the other hand, made a horrific noise when Brosca jammed her knives in its back and- dissolved into shadows and smoke. 

Brosca darted a glance around her, but it was gone, and there was another one of the short darkspawn charging her. She kicked its legs out from under it, cutting off its horrifying chortling, and used the steel heel of her new armor to crush its skull. Another darkspawn came at her. She blocked its blow on her knives, kicked at its ankles, then let out a sharp noise of surprise as she felt claws scrape against her armor. 

The shrieking told her where that had come from. She cursed, struck out against the darkspawn that was attacking from the front, and spent a second debating whether to turn and face the blows raining on her back. No more than a second - she blinked, and the darkspawn in front of her had a sword through its chest. 

Aeducan threw it off of her sword with a flick of her wrist, then spun to catch a blow from one of the tall ones on her shield. Brosca turned too, putting Aeducan at her back and striking at the shrieking darkspawn with her knives. She caught it on the wrist, shoved through its reflexive crouch with an elbow, and buried her knife in its jugular.

Two more darkspawn, one more of the shrieks, and Brosca’s back was pressed to Aeducan’s, her breathing harsh and heavy in the silence of the cave. 

“That’s it,” Aeducan said, sounding a little short of breath herself. She should have saved the air, Brosca could have told her that saying a fight was over just made more enemies come out of the woodwork.

This was, funnily enough, no exception. 

No sooner had the words left Aeducan’s mouth than the ground shook, footsteps thundering against the ground with enough force to shake small chips of rock from the ceiling. Brosca pushed away from the reassuring solidity of Aeducan’s back, and tried not to gape at the creature rushing towards them. Giant, horned, and snarling with an ugly mouth of sharp teeth, it roared, and then bent its head for a charge.

“Shit,” said Aeducan, faintly, and Brosca couldn’t even turn to react to that, because the ogre was rushing them and she had to duck away from its horns.

It slammed into the wall with an impact that shook the entire cavern, showering them again in small chips of stone. Brosca cursed and darted towards its back. It turned, clumsy and slow, but quick enough to look at Brosca straight on. She had time to think a few frantic curses, before it slammed a fist down, almost on top of her.

Almost, because Aeducan shouldered her out of the way, and caught the blow on her shield. The wood splintered with the force of it, leaving the shield as little more than a chunk of dented metal and leather straps. Aeducan didn’t seem bothered, but then, she never did. 

Instead, she let out an echoing war cry and struck at the ogre with her sword. Its edge caught the bone of the ogre’s forehead, and it pressed forward, forcing Aeducan back a step with a shriek of iron boots on stone floor.

But, the ogre didn’t get the chance to follow through. Brosca had been watching Aeducan, but her body had maneuvered her behind the ogre almost without her noticing it. With a single brutal blow, she drove her blade through the meat of the ogre’s leg and tore, ripping through the muscle deep enough to make sure it’d never charge again. It bellowed its pain and rage, pressing its hands to the floor to try and rise, shake off the pain, but Brosca didn’t give it the chance. She pulled out her blade and stabbed it in the ogre’s back.

Hand over hand, jamming her blade deep into the ogre’s back with every step, she climbed her way up its back. It bent forward with her weight, twisting beneath her to try and shake her off, but Brosca would not be denied. With a war cry of her own, she shoved her knives through the back of its skull.

The ogre toppled, Aeducan ducking out of the way of its corpse as it went. Brosca yanked her knives out of its head, her hands trembling a little with adrenaline, and tipped her head to look at Aeducan.

“You said ‘shit’,” she said, unable to help a grin.

Aeducan ducked her head, her eyes crinkling a little in the closest she ever got to a smile. “You’re a bad influence,” she said, but it was soft and fond.

-

It felt like time moved faster in the deep roads than it had in the city.

Perhaps it was because they were moving faster. It was easier to traverse than caverns or cities, even when they had to route through caverns to get around broken stone or patches of lava. It should have felt better too, to finally be moving, to be on the road to getting out of here.

Instead, Brosca felt herself dreading their arrival on the surface.

It wasn’t sensible, and she knew it. The surface didn’t have the risk of random darkspawn attacks or fragile stone footings or cave-ins caused by lava. There would be easy access to water that didn’t taste like metal and ash, and food that wasn’t lichen or nug or deep mushroom. 

But once they made it to the surface, things would change. Brosca had made vague plans to joining a mercenary group, or perhaps finding a branch of the Carta that hadn’t been fond of Beraht. She had no idea what Aeducan wanted to do - if she had any plans at all. 

That was, Brosca thought, exasperated with herself, the real source of the dread. The feeling that time was slipping away from her, that once they left the deep roads Aeducan, too, would slip out of her grasp like so much sand. The princess of Orzammar would have resources, plans, someplace that she might stay on the surface. Even a disowned princess must have better things to do than stick around someone she’d only befriended because doing otherwise might get the both of them killed.

Brosca didn’t want to leave Aeducan behind. She didn’t want Aeducan to leave her, period. 

That feeling, the nebulous fear and longing that went with it, they weren’t familiar to her. The closest she’d ever felt to it was worrying about Rica heading up to the Diamond quarter, and she hadn’t ever worried about Rica letting her go. Rica had always been clear that she would take Brosca with her, and there was nothing in Dust Town she’d have been sad to leave behind. More to the point, there was no one there worth staying for. 

She had no idea what to say, how to put the feeling into words, and it was pissing her off.

Before she knew it, before she was ready for it, Aeducan had stopped, and pointed out a side tunnel with another one of her unreadable expressions.

“That’s it,” she said, quietly, “the surface is through there.”

Neither of them moved.

“Look-” said Brosca.

“I-” Aeducan said, over the top of her.

They both stopped.

“You first,” said Brosca. It was a coward’s move, but she still couldn’t put what she wanted to say in words.

“I-” Aeducan stopped, looked away from her, worrying at the hilt of her sword, “what do you plan to do, when you get to the surface?”

Brosca frowned. “I- don’t know. Join up with a mercenary group, maybe. Make a living with my knives. There’s no caste up there, I might even enlist with the army.” She was babbling, she knew she was babbling. Brosca cut herself off, and finally forced herself to say something brave. “Why? Do you want to come with?”

Aeducan looked back to her, scrutinizing her face for a long moment. “I-” she stopped. Swallowed. In a smaller voice, she said, “I would like that, actually.”

Brosca felt her face split into a grin. “Then come on,” she said, extending a hand, “let’s go.”

Aeducan hesitated. “What did you want to say?”

“Same thing,” Brosca admitted, “I wanted to know if you’d join me.”

Aeducan put her hand in Brosca’s, curled her fingers close in a firm, decisive grip. “Yes,” she said, “I will.”

Brosca tugged her forward, and, on some instinct she was reluctant to examine, pressed a kiss to Aeducan’s sweaty forehead. While Aeducan was processing that, she turned and tugged her through the tunnel, into the harsh light of the surfacer sun.

She’d figure out what that meant later.

They had time.

**Author's Note:**

> Me, smacking this fic with a shovel: How did you get so long?! Stop!  
> Fic, spitting blood back at me: Fuck you *grows another thousand words*


End file.
